financial reform

A few weeks ago, as Congress raked various Goldman suits over the coals for peddling financial products they had later bet against, some observers complained lawmakers’ ire was being directed at the wrong culprits. It was the ratings agencies, the critics argued, that had made these doomed-to-fail packages of debt glimmer and shine. (Our …

As Adam writes below, President Obama released a rather scathing statement condemning an amendment by Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., to weaken the proposed Consumer Financial Regulatory Agency. At a White House briefing today, Neal Wolin, the Treasury sherpa for regulatory reform, declined to say that the statement was a veto threat. “We …

The White House’s general approach to legislation has been to be an interested party — a nudge here, a supportive statement there — while the president himself stays out of the nitty-gritty day-to-day process. Many a commentator insisted he was too aloof on health care, letting petty and parochial interests in Congress hijack his …

The Senate began voting on amendments to their financial re-regulation bill in earnest Wednesday with changes from Barbara Boxer and the Shelby/Dodd tag-team sailing through on bipartisan votes. The ultimate impact to the bill? Not a lot. Boxer’s amendment was a three-paragraph gimmee explicitly stating in plain language what the …

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this afternoon made a second pass at starting debate on financial reregulation but to no avail: the vote ended exactly as it did yesterday 57-41, mostly along party lines. The scene is starting to feel a bit like Groundhog Day: isn’t doing the same thing repeatedly expecting different results the …

One of the casualties of the bitter year-long Congressional battle over health reform was good public standing of the endeavor as a whole. While individual policy proposals within the Democrats’ framework remained popular, the country soured on the patchwork package those policies formed. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released today …

“We’re very close to a deal,” Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee said Wednesday. “We’ll take the next step,” intoned Senator Olympia Snowe, a prime target for aisle-crossing outreach. “Folks on our side of the aisle want a bill,” Bob Corker, a key GOP architect of portions of the Senate bill, …

Before a packed crowd at New York’s Cooper Union, Barack Obama made a forceful appeal for regulation of the financial markets. “The American experiment has worked in large part because we guided the market’s invisible hand with a higher principle,” he said. “A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever …

There is a regional subplot playing out in the debate for financial reform. Here are some clues: White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel just flew up to New York to meet with investors. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell spent part of his recess meeting with big financiers in New York. President Obama will head Thursday to New York …